Present financial and business application programs are limited in the business forms that they can print. For example, such applications typically provide a limited number of invoices and/or billing statements that can be selected by a user. In general, the user selects an appropriate form such as an invoice or reminder, inputs some customer information, and prints the form for sending to a customer.
Although different kinds of businesses need different kinds of forms, the forms provided by current applications are not very flexible or customizable. For example, in one application program, hard-coded templates are provided, from which the user selects a form that is most appropriate for the user's business. A slightly more customizable application program provides a dialog box for the user to choose the fields that the user wants to present in the business form. Although this enables some customization, the user is not permitted to edit or manipulate the fields that were chosen. Moreover, the user is unable to change colors or fonts, or remove or add text to the form.
However, one form is often more suitable than another for a particular business, even when considering only one type of business form. For example, a service business would not want the same type of invoice as a business that sold parts but provided no services, while yet another business would want to list both parts and labor on an invoice. Thus, although most businesses are dependent on the application program for its forms, the application program developers cannot foresee or efficiently provide enough varieties of forms to suit the many various types of businesses that exist.
A sophisticated user could, in theory, create customized forms or templates for use with these types of applications, but only if the user was familiar with the proper programming language and/or was capable of implementing that programming language to modify the selected form. For most businesses, a relatively advanced developer would be thus required for the creation of new or altered business forms. Most small businesses that use such an application program do not readily have access to such a skilled individual, and hiring one would be often cost prohibitive. Even if one or more skilled developers were available, however, the developers may have to perform a relatively major rewrite of the underlying code, depending on how the templates are filled in with customer data. In sum, business forms in financial and other business applications cannot be easily created, edited, and manipulated by a user or a third party.